Obituaries can be one of the best sources for genealogy leads. When all else fails, hints contained in an obit can break through our brick walls.

Tara Calishain has created a free "Search Gizmo" for finding obituaries.  

She writes, "Trying to find an obituary? Obit Magnet takes a name and death date and generates obituary search URLs for Google Books (newspapers only), Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and Chronicling America."  Obit Magnet searches a 7-day span after the date of death and if that does not find any results, it then searches a 15-day span.

Tara also has other free “gizmos” and some of the categories on the menu bar include Google News, Name Search, Internet Archives and Genealogy.

(Thanks to Donna Jones for sharing this tip!)